Kerala has just survived the worst flood since 1924 (1099, if you go by the Malayalam calendar). How was the century-old flood like? There aren’t many around to tell us but official records and monuments point to a grim scene.
“The flood of '99', as it is popularly known, devastated the princely states of Travancore and Kochi as well as the British-controlled Malabar. India was not independent and Kerala was not yet an idea.
The modest towns were flooded. Roads and bridges were washed away. The people stood shoulder to shoulder to revive their homeland, just as we do now.
The dark monsoon
The monsoon was particularly harsh in 1924. Incessant rain over three weeks in July and August flooded most parts of Travancore, Kochi and Malabar. The legendary flood has been mostly associated with the River Periyar and its banks. The most famous anecdotes relate to the flooding of the hill station of Munnar and the washing away of the Kundala Valley monorail.
The British Malabar was equally miserable. The southern areas of Malabar, roughly the present-day districts of Kozhikode, Malappuram, Palakkad and Thrissur, was hit hard. The Kozhikode town was paralysed. Many of its residents drowned. Most of the houses in the region were destroyed. Pets and livestock died en mass.
Isolated by water
The roads were battered and the mountain gaps blocked. Trains stopped service. Not even row boats could be relied upon due to the strong currents. The postal network became nonexistent. Telegraph went down. Kozhikode was completely cutoff. It took several months for south Malabar to limp back to normalcy.
The torrential rain in 1924 started out like in 2018. It started raining heavily in Kozhikode and Wayanad districts in July and August. The catastrophes that started with the landslide on the Karinjola hill and the subsequent downpour on August 16, 17 and 18 were chilling reminders of the pattern from a century ago.
In 1924, hilly regions of Kozhikode and Wayanad received heavy showers since July 12. Vaithiri received 16.72 inches (42.47 cm) of rain on July 14, according to a report from the Malabar collector. This time, the hills received a maximum of 26 cm of rain, enough to fill up the reservoirs and flood the rivers.
The girders of the bridge over the Kallayi River were submerged. The Kadalundi River and the Chaliyar were in spate.
Raining misery
The Kozhikode, Ponnani and Eranad taluks were devastated in the flood. Nobody knew how many people perished in the calamity. A dozen people had died in Kozhikode alone. A lawyer from Manjeri drowned when a boat capsized.
Many other died when their houses collapsed or trees fell on them. A foreign national also died in the flood near Shoranur, the collector’s report said. People ran up hills or climbed coconut trees to escape the surging water. Many of them were rescued by boatmen.
Data was available on only three of the four firkas of Kozhikode. As many as 22,000 houses crumbled across the district, 3,372 in Kozhikode taluk alone. In nearby Wayanad, three tile-roofed houses and 39 thatched huts were destroyed.
The timber depots of Kallayi and nearby areas suffered huge losses as the floods washed away the timbers moored in the river. The heavy logs were transported through the rivers in those days.
The loss of livestock was pegged Rs 3,000 for each taluk. That was an eye-popping number then. Even two elephants were washed away from the Nilambur Kovilakam.
Destruction all around
Crop losses were reported from 5,000 acres of the Kozhikode taluk. The loss was almost double by area in the Ponnani taluk. As much as 30,000 acres were affected across the district.
The bridges of Farooq and Kallayi withstood the ravages of currents but they were soon submerged. The bridges at Mahe, Nellipuzha, Bavalipuzha and Pulamanthol were broken, putting an end to road transport.
Four pillars of the Shoranur bridge, which connected the state of Madras to Kochi, were damaged. The Periya gap and the Nadukani gap were shattered. People from Kozhikode could not go to Adivaram.
The road to Adivaram was flooded at three places. Only one of the two postal clerks who were carrying letters to Kozhikode made it to the town. He trekked mountains and rowed boats to reach his destination.
The bullocks who were crucial in transporting cargo to Wayanad died in the flood. Farmlands were wasted under a thick coat of silt. The government exempted farmers from paying taxes. All of them were distributed money to buy seeds. The situation remained grim for many months.
Safe heights
All higher terrains in the state were turned into relief camps. Coordination of the numerous camps was a challenge in those days without mobile phones or social media. There was no way to mobilise food the way we did. The Samoothiri School in the heart of the Kozhikode city had housed 750 people displaced by the flood. The Kozhikode Ladies Club raised Rs 6,000 for relief and rehabilitation activities. Everyone from the royal family members to baron Colombo Imbichi pitched in with contributions. So did the Ramakrishna Mission, Arya Samaj, YMCA and Tabligh.
The situation was very difficult because of primitive modes of communication. The collector could not even contact the sub-collector easily.
Looming famine
The Kozhikode town faced a severe famine after the flood. The rice stock depleted fast as the rail traffic was disrupted. Even the cargo ships carrying loads of rice could not come near the coast because of the adverse weather.
When the collector ordered to take stock of the rice supply in the shops of the Kozhikode town, it was not a comforting scene. The city had only a month's supply given that 500 sacks of rice was required for a day.
The revenue divisional officer reported that wholesale merchants could stock up to 40,000 sacks of rice and retailers up to 10,000 sacks. An additional 4,000 sacks were to be shipped. The collector met prominent merchants including Guptan Namboodiripad, Varghese and Menakji and asked them to ensure the availability of rice.
Telling documents
Documents related to the flood are kept in the regional archives in Kozhikode. The letters the RDO sent to the collector, the communiques sent by the collector to the revenue department head in Madras and the responses he received are some of the sources to learn about the flood.
“When this letter will reach its destination I cannot say,” wrote the collector to his superiors in Madras. “Calicut (now Kozhikode) has been entirely cut off from the south and the east since the night of Wednesday last - the 16th (of July).”“I now hear that an attempt is to be made to despatch letters tomorrow. They are apparently to be trollied along the railway line - and ferried across the breaches - as far as Tirur, and conveyed from there by runners to a point on the line - somewhere in the neighbourhood of Olavakkod - where transport by train becomes possible,” says the letter sent on July 21 to inform about the rain between July 12 and 19.
The collector had also written that the telegraph system had gone haywire. The telegraph was working between Kozhikode and Tirur. From Tirur they had to rely on the railway’s telegraph. However, beyond Kuttippuram there was nothing. Transport by road was out of the question. The Periya gap and the Tamarasseri gap had become inaccessible due to landslides.
The collector sent another letter to Madras on July 24. The first letter never made it beyond Palakkad. The bearer was stuck near Patham Mile near Mannarkkad on the Palakkad Road after the Nellipuzha bridge was washed away. A copy of the first letter accompanied the second letter.
Alarming surge
The then-revenue divisional officer Mathai has narrated the horrors of the flood in a letter to the collector. He has written how he visited Puthiyara, Mooriyad, Kundungal, Eranjippalam and Kallayi with great difficulty.
Mathai said that those places were so flooded that it was impossible to row a boat. The Mooriyad bridge was completely under water. An adventurer dared to cross the river but his boat was shattered when it was rammed against the bridge. A timber shed fell apart in Kallayi and logs drifted away. Mathai said that Parry and Co suffered the greatest loss.
Carcasses of cattle were all over Kallayi River. The road to the railway station was submerged. Nadakkavu Road and Kundamangalam Road were under water.
The civil court had no business to do as people were too busy to pursue the cases. Eranjippalam and surrounding areas resembled a sea. Most of the houses were destroyed at Eranjippalam and Puthiyara. The Puthiyara bridge was at the risk of being washed away.
The water has reached up to the vegetable garden in the jail. Those who had gone to the city to work had been stranded there. The Valayanad, Chevayur and Nellikode areas seemed like an endless sea. An officer at Kottuli had gone missing.
Controversies galore
The collector’s report pointed out that many of the men had taken to drinking after they lost everything in the flood. They splurged their earnings because the relief fund would take care of the affairs of the home.
Soon after the water receded, people started debating over the causes of the flood. The legislative assembly debated the question. B Das introduced a motion on behalf of Yusuf Imam. The resolution pinned the blame on the construction of roads and rails by the British government. The construction of mud bunds blocked the water flow in many places, it was argued.
The resolution was withdrawn after the government promised to look into the matter.
“Floods are nothing new to us. Everyone must have heard about the flood of ‘99. Our grandmothers had floods as reference points. They would always refer to the flood of ‘99 when referring to a death or birth in the family or the neighbourhood,” said historian T B Seluraj.
Researcher Dr V K Deepesh observed that the floods of ‘99 and 2018 acted as great unifying forces. “The shocks of Malabar rebellion and the Wagon Tragedy had not subsided when the flood (of ‘99) affected Malabar. The rebellion had led to a communal polarisation in Malabar, according to historical documents. The flood prompted the people to face the crisis together. They forgot their differences. Even the current flood came in the backdrop of a rift in society and social media. But we have realised that man is the same everywhere.”
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